Samantha Fashler

Sam started attending the Clinical Psychology program at York University in September 2012. Prior to beginning the program, she completed her Bachelor of Arts at the University of British Columbia in Psychology (UBC) and worked as a lab manager in the UBC Pain Lab for two and a half years. Her research experiences in this lab involved exploring a novel dual processing approach to pain expression and perception. For her Master's thesis, she continued to explore perceptions of pain by examining visual attention patterns of individuals with chronic pain using eye-tracking technology. She found that individuals reporting pain paid more frequent and longer attention to pain-related words than individuals who were pain-free. For her doctoral research, she is using a prospective research design to examine whether attentional biases as measured by eye movement patterns can predict the development of chronic pain and disability after surgery.